Carne’s data & analytics solution CAMDA gets a boost from Microsoft Fabric

Carne, founded in Ireland in 2004, is the leading digitally-driven platform for the global asset management industry with over 2 trillion in Assets Under Management (AUM). Carne is Europe’s largest third-party fund management company. Through simplified solutions, Carne with Its team of 700 employees and partners, continues to pioneer third-party management services and advanced data transformation to strengthen its leadership in the funds industry. By harnessing the power of data, Carne drives operational excellence and innovation, and this is where the CAMDA (Carne Automated Metadata Driven Analytics) product comes to the fore.

Carne’s Data Engineering and Analytics team has decades of experience building out data and analytical solutions. But, to keep up with the ever-evolving needs of its customers, the team knew it had to find a way to automate data pipelines and distribute data more efficiently within Carne. The solution was CAMDA which has become one of Carne’s core internal products. In fact, the solution has been so well received internally that the Data Engineering and Analytics team has become known as the CAMDA team. 

With CAMDA in place and operating for over a year, huge internal uptake and large new keystone project work meant increased stability and functionality requirements were needed. The CAMDA team worked with Prodata for architectural review, with a conclusion that the existing system would be hugely empowered by upgrading to Microsoft’s newest data platform, Microsoft Fabric. 

The issue was how to do this migration in a painless manner while keeping existing BAU processes and supporting 10x volume increases. This upgrade was effectively like repairing a plane while it was still in flight. 

One team, one system, one pipeline 

Carne’s journey to unlocking the full potential of its data began with CAMDA, the Carne Metadata Driven Analytics system.

Built by a team of seasoned data engineers and analysts, CAMDA was designed to do more than just collect information. It was created to transform it into actionable insights. Drawing from decades of experience, the team envisioned a framework that could unify internal data from hundreds of sources with external industry data, and then seamlessly turn it into Power BI semantic models.

This vision became reality through the power of metadata-driven automation, which enabled CAMDA to handle everything from building dimensional databases to generating reports, cleansing data, and even powering machine learning and AI pipelines—all through one single dynamic process.

CAMDA was initially built on the Azure Synapse Analytics architecture with a Power BI front-end. Prodata helped Carne upgrade CAMDA using its Fabric DWA Framework Accelerator because of its stronger performance options, and tighter integration with Power BI. This framework can deploy all the required components to build an enterprise data warehouse. Prodata assisted the internal team to migrate CAMDA to Microsoft Fabric seamlessly with no impact on business operations.

“For Data Engineering and Analytics, most companies run into scalability and maintenance issues as they have multiple teams using multiple products each with their own custom pipelines. CAMDA, supported by Microsoft Fabric and Prodata, has one team using one system and one meta driven pipeline giving us a proven 20x efficiencies,” Eoin O’Sullivan, Director of Data Engineering and Analytics at Carne Group, said.

Prodata had early access to technologies like Fabric and close contact with the product team via the Fabric Featured Partner Program. This was essential for Carne as they were able to go to market with completed Fabric solutions within the launch timeframe.

Carne used these capabilities to help its customers get the right information even faster in a facilitated self-service fashion. Following the upgrade to Microsoft Fabric, the team can use CAMDA to process hundreds of thousands of files per day instead of its original hundreds per day. They can also use GenAI to categorise and mine PDF documents, with the capacity to scale for future projects. Microsoft Fabric enables the data and analytics team to achieve more in a single platform, while having access to a flexible toolset with pipelines, data engineering, Lakehouse, and Data Warehouse workloads.

Better data, better service

Powerful data platforms will continue to drive business processes when the right technology is utilized. 

Carne, with help from Prodata, will continue to leverage cutting-edge data capabilities with Microsoft Fabric to expand its leading position within the funds industry.

”CAMDA’s semantic models deliver the right data, to the right people at the right time, significantly boosting CARNE’s productivity and supporting all our ManCo processes. This has enabled CARNE Group to maintain and strengthen its leading position in the funds industry,” O’Sullivan said.